For me the most important reason to use Zotero is to protect your research sources against disappearing from the net. This aspect saved my butt quite a bit last year when GeoCities was closed and a number of good information sources I had found vanished. With copies of the references safely stored in Zotero on my local PC I didn’t have to worry about manually scraping the sites before they closed or trying to find them in the WayBack Machine at Archive.org.

To help keep multiple projects organized I use Firefox profiles to give me separate Zotero databases for each project. I use my default user profile for Blackstone Valley research and then created new profiles named GWPresTour and WorkResearch for my two other active research projects. To use the other profiles I created desktop shortcuts with command lines like this: “C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxfirefox.exe” -P “GWPresTour”.

I did find one feature of Zotero a little bit annoying, the annotation toolbar that gets added to Firefox whenever you view a saved snapshot. It takes up a bit too much screen real estate and can not be toggled on and off with Firefox’s toolbars menu. A fix for this is in the last message of the Hide annotation toolbar thread at the Zotero Forums. By using the Stylish Firefox Extension I can toggle the annotation toolbar on and off easily now.